SENTENCED TO DEATH 171 



a winter rest. The Royal Literary Fund might have 

 borne the expense, since he was now too poor ; but he re- 

 fused such help, because he believed that the fund was 

 maintained by dukes and marquises, instead of authors 

 and journalists and publishers. He hated it for himself 

 as he hated the workhouse for the agricultural poor. 

 ' The idea of literature being patronized in these days 

 is too utterly nauseous.'* Perhaps, he said, he might 

 think differently were he a town-born man. He admitted 

 that only a stimulus hke that of travel or sea-air or Schwal- 

 bach could check the sinking. He had to be content with 

 the air of high-perched Crowborough, in Sussex. From 

 there, in September, 1885, he wrote : ' I cannot do any- 

 tliing. Whatever I wish to do, it seems as if a voice said, 

 " No, you must not do it." Feebleness forbids. I think 

 I would like a good walk. " No." I think I would like to 

 write. "No." I think I would like forest. "No." Always 

 "No "to everything. Even writing this letter has made the 

 spine ache almost past endurance. I cannot convey to 

 you how miserable it is to be impotent — to feel yourself 

 full of ideas and work and to be unable to effect it. It 

 is absolutely maddening. Still, the autumn comes on, 

 and there is no staying it.' A visit to the sea at Bexhill 

 brought him some ease, but he had an attack of vomiting 

 blood soon afterwards. In September, 1886, he described 

 himself as having been a complete invalid for some years. 

 In October, he said that for five years he had not slept 

 properly. A fund was now privately raised, and in 

 December, 1886, he w^as at Goring, near Worthing. He 

 studied medical books, especially on tuberculosis, and 

 wrote an account of his own illness. His diseases, his 

 ' distressing neuralgia and other nerve sufferings,' were 

 caused at first, he suspected, by ' too ceaseless work.' 

 ' There are,' he says, ' few — very few, perhaps none 

 living — who have come through such a series of diseases. 'f 

 He was an intractable patient — prejudiced against the 

 diet, for example, that was imposed. He was now a 



* To Mr. C. P. Scott. t /i>t(i' 



